Did You Know: Eli Roth claims he turned down The Hulk, Halo, and Live Free or Die Hard to instead make Hostel: Part II?

“It’s interesting, because I’ve had opportunities to do franchise movies. Once your movie opens at #1, you’re offered everything. There were movies like Halo, and they’re remaking The Hulk again, and Die Hard 4, and I just thought I’d rather write and direct and do my own thing,” Roth revealed to VH1. “I don’t need to jump to a $100 million movie. There were some books I was interested in. I was like, I’d love to do ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ or ‘In the Heart of the Sea.’ But the truth is, right now I love writing and directing my own stories.”

When asked about the many horror remakes being put into production, Roth told /Film (at the Grindhouse junket):

“Yeah, I know. Because I get offered all of them first,” said Roth. “I’m on the short listâ€¦ There is always like a few guys that they go to right away as soon as they get the rights to a remake.”

“But my feeling is, I love original ideas and I think you have to support original ideas but without remakes, we wouldn’t have John Carpenter’s The Thing. We wouldn’t have Chuck Russell’s The Blob. We wouldn’t have Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. We wouldn’t have the hammer horror of the 60’s. So I think that you just can’t blanketly ignore remakes. You can’t just go “Why are they doing all these remakes?!” You can on one level, but c’mon if Zack Snyder had not directed Dawn of the Dead we wouldn’t have the 300. So everyone needs to keep that in mind. As long as it’s a good movie, I’m all for it. Conceptually doing a remake? Yeah, I wish there were more original ideas. But if someone does a remake and does a great job with it, how is that a bad thing?”